SOCIALISM AND COLD WAR
721
gets and luxuries had been created. Instead of having plenty of
money in our pockets and little to spend it on except cheap rationed
essentials, we all wanted a world in which rationing was replaced
by the widest range of consumer choice. And when our natural de–
sire to make up for wartime scarcity was further stimulated by
enormously expensive and sophisticated advertising campaigns and
the temptations of hire purchase, the consumer demand swelled
even further.
At the very moment, however, when each of us wanted to re–
stock our homes, the community had equally urgent needs for re–
pairing the damages of war, for building not only the houses but
roads and railways, the hospitals, schools and universities and–
most important of all-for re-equipping our basic industries. Thus
a tremendous conflict developed between the demands of the com–
munity and the individual consumer, and between those of the pub–
lic and private sectors of the economy.
It was a conflict, however, in which victory for one side was
predetermined. Whether, as was done under the Attlee Government,
the attempt was made to exert direct control on the private sector or
whether control was limited, as under the Tories, to fiscal sanctions
made surprisingly little difference.
For the dynamo which keeps our
modern Affluent Society moving
is
the big consumption industries,
particularly the motor-car industry. It is only by permitting a con–
stant increase in the size, profitability and political importance of
these industries that an old-fashioned slump
is
avoided.
The pros–
perity of America, it has been ironically observed, and with it the
security of the whole Western world, depends on whether the Ameri–
can people can be persuaded each year to consume six million new
cars.
If,
in any year, that figure falls to four million, there is a sharp
recession; if to two million, a (non-Communist) world slump.
There is one important deduction from Professor Galbraith's
analysis which British Socialists have been extremely reluctant to
make.
If
the health of the Western economies depends on artificially
creating an ever more extravagant demand for increasingly un–
necessary consumer goods, then the maintenance of public services
must
always
take second place to the satisfaction of private con–
sumer needs. For the money to pay for these public services derives
from taxation, whose level, so long as the private sector dominates
